A few days ago, I gave “floating” (also popularly known as sensory deprivation) a try. Christine had given me a gift certificate to a local float company last year, and after returning from a vacation in China (and a 14 hour time zone difference) I thought it might be just what my frazzled brain might need.

I emailed back and forth with the owner a few times before the China trip, figuring out schedules, how to prepare, and that sort of thing. I confessed that I’d never considered floating before; like a lot of people my age, probably the first thing that comes to our minds is Homer Simpson in his float tank. New-age stuff that’s a little silly, a little wacky-west-coast kind of feel.

Anyway, the float facility itself was great. Calming music, lights, calming owner – he explained everything very thoroughly and everything was provided for. I slipped into the tank pictured at the top of this post, turned the music to low, and the room light shut off on a motion timer a moment later. Everything was great… except afterward, my back hurt like never before. Yikes.

I’ve never mentioned it on HeiseHeise.com before, but I was born with a minor genetic back deformity called “Scheuermann’s Disease” which causes a curvature of the spine, otherwise known clinically kyphosis… or less kindly, as “hunchback.” I was teased sometimes by kids in school for always looking like I was slightly slouching, and my show choir teacher sometimes ordered me to stand up straight as I was dancing, to which I’d think, “I am standing up straight! …wasn’t I?” I wasn’t diagnosed with the disease until midway through high school, but it’s never been a big deal to me. It’s a minor curvature, only 10-12 degrees more than “normal,” my back never hurt, and I got a bonus of extra large lungs (common for people with the disease) which have always aided in me in endurance running and cycling.

During the float, the buoyancy of the salt water was pushing my entire spine into a straight line. For the first 10-15 minutes I didn’t notice pain, just pressure, but as time went on, the increasing pain became all I could think about. Because float tanks are shallow – probably 6-8 inches total, I couldn’t even jack-knife my body in the water to alleviate the pressure without just giving up and fully sitting up in the water.

Afterward, I sat down with the facility’s owner and confessed to him that it wasn’t a great experience for me, while reassuring him it wasn’t his fault. He confessed in turn that he’d never heard of kyphosis before (heh, yeah – everyone’s heard of scoliosis, including Firefox’s spell checker as I’m writing this, but kyphosis can’t get no respect!) but agreed that yes, it made sense that a spine curved along the sagittal plane would react negatively to floating. He went to his computer to check in his Float Owner Group forum, but no one had mentioned it there. He even vowed to bring it up at the next nationwide Float Facility Owner’s Conference. And Google Search doesn’t turn up any public results either. When I looked, I saw that supposedly scoliosis can be comforted by this, since its curvature is along the opposing plane. Good for those folks, at least.

So, I figured I’d write a relatively short blog entry (by my standards at least) encouraging anyone who’s searched those keywords to please, check with your doctor about floating if you have postural or genetically-caused kyphosis. Postural kyphosis can supposedly be fixed by yoga, stretching, and other normal activities, but there’s a chance (and I’ll need to contact my doctor, too, if I decide to float again) that those of us with the latter might never get to experience the tranquil bliss of a float.

The owner had a positive note, though – he mentioned that out in Portland Oregon they have vertical-style float tanks, like Luke in his Bacta tank in Empire Strikes Back, (except with your head above the water) and that those might not cause the same pressure/pain problem. Now that’s a load off my back!

On the (east) shore of Hangzhou’s West Lake

In my previous entry, I touched a bit on the ability of QR codes on shared bikes, as a convenient and very cheap way to get around major cities. Shanghai has 24 million people in it, but we also visited the nearby Hangzhou, which “only” has 7 million people in its urban core. We saw bike share prices ranging from 10 yuen cents per hours, to one yuen per hour. As of this writing, a yuen is worth about 15 cents… so yeah, pretty cheap.

The bullet train to Hangzhou was cheap too, 88 yuen one-way. Clean and spacious, with somber-faced apron-wearing attendants quietly mopping the floor of footprints after each stop. On initial startup, the train would glide forward slowly, with none of the creaking and clanking noise of wheels grinding against tracks that we associate with trains. It took quite awhile to get from Shanghai Central Station to the Western station, at a pretty low speed for safety. But once out of the city, we got our first and only chance to glimpse at how rural Chinese people live. Bearing in mind too, that these folks were still only a 20-30 minute drive outside the city so we can’t truly classify them as rural as I know still so many Chinese villages exist hours away from major cities! The houses I saw though, were palatial mansions in comparison to the small apartments that the average Shanghai citizen would be able to afford. Daniel told us that Shanghai is one of the most expensive cities in China, and that housing costs are outpacing food and transportation. I told him it was similar in the USA: more than those two things, space to live in is something you can’t just import or create, so prices are skyrocketing. But these outside-Shanghai houses seem to rejoice in their expansive land options, and building 3 story homes, even though plain and unadorned on the outside (most were of the simple vertical rectangle style) they had plenty of space! Farms and rice paddies seemed to be the norm.

Okay, I got my money’s worth

Within 10 minutes outside the city, the train had increased its speed up to the rated 300 kilometers per hour and the vibrations and noises had increased to what Amtrack customers would probably classify as “normal” – I’ll admit it wasn’t the face-melting experience I might have been hoping for, but it says a lot for the quality of engineering that 300kph felt slow and comfortable, and I wanted to say “what, this is it? This baby feels like it could go so much faster!” However, Hangzhou is only an hour away at 300kph so really, by the time we got up to speed, we only got to keep at that pace for a few minutes before we were already gracefully slowing back down again to reach the first stop on the outskirts of the “small” city.

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Looking at China’s technological expertise firsthand during our week in Shanghai is simultaneously awe-inspiring and unnerving. We know that we’re in China’s most expensive city, which arguably pushes tech even further than it might be in other parts of the country, but even with that in mind, I sometimes felt like it will take the USA ages to catch up with things that the Chinese take for granted – or possibly, we’ll never catch up at all. More on that below.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first – yes, the Great Firewall is large and imposing. An obvious show of strength and control by a totalitarian one-party government. The list of websites they’ve blocked, both western and of course, many more local Chinese ones, is large and growing all the time. Websites rarely, if ever, get taken off the block list once they’re put on it, either. Piss off “the party” once, and you’re blocked for all time. There’s no recourse to turn to and say, “look, I took down the post where I pointed out the failings or vast corporate wealth of party leader such-and-such, can I be allowed back again?”

Google search is gone. Gmail seems, weirdly, to allow mail to be sent (sometimes) but not to be received. Facebook and its sub-companies (instagram and whatsapp) are all wiped out. But hey, you’ve got Skype and the Chinese-hosted version of Bing Search! Christine, who didn’t have a VPN on her phone, has gotten very used to searching with Bing now. It’s just as terrible of a search engine in Chinese as it is in English.

I came equipped with two VPNs on my phone – my work one, and a personal one running off my home router. The former is IPSec Xauth, and the latter is PPTP (yes I know it’s old and insecure! I just needed it to see if it could circumvent the Great Firewall!) – the IPSec one worked almost always and could connect very quickly, the PPTP one worked most of the time (some wifi routers seemed to block it without exception) and could connect a bit slower. So my analysis is that as of January 2019, the GF is not completely blocking all PPTP connections, as some websites have posited. The blocks are, as I expected, for commercial VPN companies that are publishing their VPN addresses online for the Chinese government to scoop up and block, not for the entire PPTP protocol. While it would be trivial for the GF to block all PPTP traffic (it uses well known and easily blockable protocols) the Chinese government is now very pro-capitalist and very pro-money. Corporations might not be using PPTP very much anymore (and they sure the heck shouldn’t be, as it can be decrypted within a day) but the Chinese government doesn’t want to run the risk of scaring away companies and their valuable tax revenue by blocking corporate VPN traffic – they seem to only want to block commercial ones.

Okay, enough arcane tech jargon.

What isn’t blocked by the GF? Wechat. 100% Wechat. I remember 5-10 years ago China also used a chat client called QQ (and my AFS brother Daniel still uses an email address with the wonderfully short qq.com domain name (I love me a short email domain!)) but now in 2019, any other GF-approved companies have been washed away by the dominating flood of Wechat. Every person uses it, and every company uses it.

Christine prepares to have Daniel pay 30 yuen for a “Mr Wish” mystery box (she got a big bottle of shampoo)

QR codes. Relegated to an amusing nerd “wouldn’t it be cool if we used these?” oddity in the USA, China has grabbed the ball and run with them so far that there’s essential no way we could ever catch up. Beyond the usual “chat client” functionality of Wechat that we Americans can understand and use ourselves, the other 75% of wechat is how it uses QR codes. If you give Wechat the ability to access your smartphone camera (and let’s face it, most do) then you can enter its “scanner” mode, and aim it at a QR code. Every billboard for every company, large or small, will stick at least 1-2 QR codes on it that you can scan to “follow” that company’s news postings. This is how Wechat is not only a chat system, but also a twitter-esque social media system with a “newsfeed” of public postings by your friends, official company handles, and internal groups – just like how we use them.

But let’s take restaurants. Sure, they have a wechat handle you can follow. Sure, even a noodle cart will let you pay for your meal by displaying your personal wechat QR code, which is linked to your bank account or credit card, and payment takes less than 5 seconds, your phone vibrates and a notification pops up that “15 yuen has been deducted”. But in four different larger restaurants we went to, even each individual table had its own, personal QR code that you could scan with your phone, immediately be linked to not just a menu, but a full ordering system where you could have any item on the menu, sent directly to your table. Interaction with waiters is essentially null at places like these.

We went to a karaoke house with Daniel, his wife Valerie, and his dad Steven. When most Americans think Karaoke, we think of a Bar format, where there’s usually a DJ, a book of songs he has, and you come up with pieces of paper and give them to him, and he keeps track of what order people give them to him. Then you have to wait your turn, put up with people who aren’t your friends singing terribly, and all that jazz. The Chinese would laugh at us if they saw this. Their karaoke setup is worlds ahead of ours – for $20, our party of 5 got a private room with three microphones, a TV on each wall showing music videos with lyrics overlaid, and a control screen where you can modify the volume of the backing audio, the main vocals track (if you need help singing, for example), and choose the next song out of an internet-connected list of thousands. But of course, you can also aim your phone at a QR code and be automatically connected to the control system for your specific room and do everything from there. Amazing.

Christine works with the control screen instead of using her phone – foreigner problems!

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I’ll make no secret of the fact that this blog is 10 years old; something I’m very proud of. However, I’m less proud of the fact that my theme, based on Talian 1.0, is also 10 years old. The maker of the the theme, Steve Arun, seems to have entirely pivoted away from themes to focus on his Virtual Assistant business, and there’s no visible mention of it on his site anymore, nor on the FB page he made for his theme(?!?)

My previous blog post was a test of whether or not I could make a post on mobile, while at a concert, and have it not look like complete crap. Well, H265 encoded videos having no video and only audio aside (hey, at least they work in Safari, Edge, and Internet Explorer!), the pictures were the main problem. A Galaxy S9 photo defaults to what, 4k by 2.2k resolution? When Talian 1.0 was built in 2006, no one was putting pictures that size on the internet. Who’d be able to download them without it taking 5 minutes per photo?

WordPress rolled out “responsive images” back in v4.4 and I was left in the dust. Whenever I uploaded an image onto the internet, be it on mobile or desktop, I’d have to carefully handcraft each entry, making sure horizontal width didn’t exceed the fixed-width “body” of 400px (heh, the old days when 1920×1200 was a big screen).

Today, I’ve discovered the CSS entry “max-entry: 100%” and that % sign is my new best friend. I’ve stuck that onto the img, video, and iframe elements (for Youtube embeds) of the venerable Talian’s stylesheet, and from now on, no more needing to monkey with images quite so much.

Also, Christine and I made Soy Deviled Eggs for Thanksgiving Yesterday. They were delicious.

No messing with this image! Well, except to set the open-in-new-tab function. Grr.

Note – videos work in Edge, Internet Explorer, and Safari. They’re encoded with H265 which doesn’t have support with Chrome and Firefox.

Since returning from Jordan back in 2010, my musical tastes have changed quite a bit. One of my go-to melodic electronic bands in the past decade has been El Ten Eleven. They were at the High Noon Saloon tonight with Thunder Dreamer opening for them. Bassist/guitarist Kristian Dunn was his usual theatrical self, self deprecatingly joking with the crowd when first his looping pedal and then actually his amp exhibited a few random electric problems. Dunn soon fixed them and was back to wowing the crowd with some super relaxing loops.

The band just came out with its sixth studio album since they first published in 2004, the new one being named “Bankers Hill” – their merch table had it of course, both in vinyl and also cassette tape. I couldn’t believe it! You’ve gotta be pretty dedicated to still be picking up cassettes in 2018.

They had a great light show going on, too. I had a chance to speak with their soundboard operator, who told me that he was from Denver, and joined them whenever they started a tour out from California. The band’s now 18 years old and have had plenty of opportunities to do so! It was his first time visiting us here in Madison at the High Noon Saloon, and he said he was really liking the acoustics.

Speaking of which, whoever that soundboard operator was, he did a great job of tuning his tones to the space. Everything was comfortable to list to without earplugs, and both Kristian on his guitar and loopers and Tim on his drums blended perfectly in the room. As well they should after so many years of playing together!

I haven’t spoken about young Miss Arriba Mordida Heise very much since Christine and I welcomed the tiny 2 pound, six inch long kitten into our condo back in mid September 2017. Cats weren’t allowed in our condo and as this is a publicly viewable blog that I put my real name on, you do the math. However, the end of our time in that condo – and in Panama itself – has arrived. Arriba and I flew back to the USA together on Monday afternoon, the 19th of June.

“Going somewhere, papa? Have fun; see you when you get back!”

I didn’t write about my parents’ visit to Panama in early May; I had just had my Galaxy S8 lost/left behind (and then immediately stolen) from a bus a few weeks after my last blog post regarding Mexico, and I was feeling pretty depressed. When you don’t have a job and you’d only owned your flagship smartphone for six months before losing it, some people might tend to mentally beat themselves up a lot. I wasn’t in the mood to write very much.

But my parents enjoyed meeting the feisty, spritely and energetic kitten that they’d come to know from Christine and I sending private messages and photos to our shared family Google Hangouts chat. They knew that we were having trouble finding a forever home for a spirited – and unfortunately a bit bitey, as you’d guess from the middle name I gave her – 10 month old kitten. My mother was a bit dubious – how would a single female kitten fit with their current cat, a large plump male orange tabby? My father, the softy that he is, seemed instantly smitten with her playful ways, and although she wasn’t on her best behavior for the two of them, her sheer playfulness and loads of personality seemed to be winning them over.

A few days after they flew back to the USA, they told me they’d acquire a second female cat of a similar age, whom they named Mariposa, the Spanish word for Butterfly (one of their favorite hotels in Panama was called the Casa Mariposa in Valle de Anton, the same place where Clayton and Aurelia stayed back in January). Mariposa and Riba could be buddies so old man Suleiman, the orange tabby, wouldn’t feel too stressed by lots of kitten attention directed solely at him.

Now Arriba would have a home. Christine and I were thrilled. She, however, is staying in Panama for a few more weeks before doing some more traveling (you may have heard of the 330 Rule if you’re an expat) so we both knew right away that the task of bringing Riba to live with her grandparents would fall entirely to me. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but for the opportunity to see Riba live out her life only an hour from me instead of thousands of miles away in Panama, I decided it would be worth it.

Now, what airline to choose? Kayak made it easy: the only options seemed to be the hated Spirit Airlines, bane of laid-over travelers, or the pricey United subsidiary, Copa Airlines, based out of Panama. Spirit didn’t accept pet travel internationally. That only left Copa. And they only allowed pet travel on weekdays, not weekends, so there you go, I already had narrowed down my possible flight days by a quarter.

We purchased some Feliway cat calming pheromone spray, and a new soft-sided cat carrying case – Copa’s website told us that our current hard-sided carrier would be too large to be used, but for whatever reason, the dimension limitations for soft sided cases was greater by an inch in all directions. I’ve been saying jokingly that Arriba is our little dandelion cat: acquired from the scrappy streets of Panama, her genetics are built to survive off of trash and whatever she could scrounge up. Imagine bringing a dandelion into your home and caring for it like a prized houseplant. Riba has grown quite large, long, and lanky over the past six months of what I know is her “adulthood” now, but in my mind she’ll always be the tiny month-old kitten, crawling onto my shoulder and falling asleep. My goodness, how she’s grown though. Still acts like a kitten though!

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that it was a tight fit for her in her new carrier. She’s not heavy; Copa restricts total weight of pet and carrier to 20lbs, and Riba by herself is a mere 10 pounds. But because of her long body, it meant that it would not be a comfortable five hour flight for her. And five hours? Add the time it takes to get from El Cangrejo, to Tocumen, to waiting in the airport, to the flight itself, to getting through USA customs, to driving back to Wisconsin (three hours) and you’re looking at twelve hours of your cat being in a cramped little carrier case.

The afternoon of the flight arrived, and at 3pm, Christine and I loaded Riba into her new carrier (she had already learned to dislike it after a twenty minute walk down the busy side streets of the city to get her export papers from a local veterinarian) along with my bags. As my hands were literally full enough already, Christine accompanied me to the airport to help sooth the frightened kitten in the car and carry her for the last time. Continue reading this post…